Becca Tarnas – The Synchronicity of the Two Red Books: Jung, Tolkien, and the Imaginal Realm
November 9, 2025 at 02:05AM
Beginning in the years leading up to the Great War, both C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien independently began to undergo profound imaginal experiences. Jung recorded these fantasies in a large red manuscript that he named Liber Novus, referred to simply as The Red Book. For Tolkien, this imaginal journey revealed to him the world of Middle-earth, whose stories and myths eventually led to the writing of, The Lord of the Rings, a book he named within its own imaginal history, The Red Book of Westmarch. This presentation explores the many synchronistic parallels between Jung’s and Tolkien’s Red Books: the style and content of their works of art, the narrative descriptions and scenes in their texts, the nature of their visions and dreams, and an underlying similarity in world view that emerged from their experiences. The two men seem to have been simultaneously treading parallel paths through the imaginal realm.

Becca Tarnas, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her research interests include depth psychology, archetypal studies, literature, philosophy, and the ecological imagination. Becca is an editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, and author of the book, Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. She is currently researching and writing a biography of Stanislav Grof, a co-founder of transpersonal psychology.
View on YouTube